Fears

Time to think can be a blessing or a curse: it all depends on what you’re thinking about, doesn’t it?

“Soon you will have to leave the business world behind”, said P. One of the choices I have been mulling over. Is it possible, I wonder, to work and write at the same time? People manage, Trollope and Larkin, for instance. I’m not sure about their other responsibilities though. I can’t go home at five o’clock - and even if I could, there is homework to supervise and supper to prepare and laundry to do.

I am resting here, with sunshine and sea and sleep and books: this is good. But I do not have my grounding. I am away from the people and places and tasks that keep me steady. I am waking with nightmares, terrors, in the small hours. I am afraid to be away, and afraid to come back too. I worry at threads that maybe weren’t even loose. I am adrift from my moorings. Everything feels so precarious; I fear I have invented the good parts of my life and when I come back they won’t be real after all.

A hug, a kind word, reassurance, means so much more than you might think. I can’t convince myself that I matter in any regard.

I feel like nothing. I feel like cobwebs. I feel like dust.